Three days after the crisis meeting with the District Commander, Stebbel was at his desk, sifting through some reports, when Dörfner strode in. He clapped his hands to get his partner’s attention as well as to signal that he had good news.
“Herr Inspector – we just got a big breakthrough!”
“We did?”
“I just spoke with the Turk. The morning after the murder, I told him we needed special help. Well, he came through.”
“Yes?”
Dörfner nodded energetically. “He had his people doing some thorough investigations. And you know what he found out? This Frau Prestel didn’t actually have a pimp.”
“She didn’t?”
“Tja, she had one for a short time. But he ran into some trouble, the Turk wasn’t specific, and he had to leave Vienna. After that, she was working on her own. For maybe the last six months.” He clapped his hands again, as if he had just about wrapped up the case.
“And how is this such good news?”
“Come on, give a smile, it won’t hurt you. No, this strengthens my theory: the killer is a pimp. He tried to get Frau von Klettenburg and this Prestel girl to join his stable. When they refused, he killed them. Or – alternative theory – he was angry that these two freelancers were poaching on his territory. He thought that they were selling their wares in an area that only his whores were allowed to work. He was protecting his interests.”
“And Maria Kolenska?”
“He wanted her to leave the Turk and join his stable. She turned him down, so he killed her.”
“The Turk? You mean Hochner.”
“Ja, ja, of course; Hochner.”
“Of course, there’s another explanation.” Dörfner raised his eyebrows to a near skeptical height; he was pretty much sold on his own two explanations.
“What do pimps do?” Stebbel asker rhetorically.
“They tell their whores where to go, how to keep customers satisfied and … then they collect their money.”
“They also protect the girls. Of course, for them, it’s more like protecting their investment. So if neither the first nor the third victim had a pimp to look after them, the killer had easy targets. Maybe that’s why he went for them.”
“And our second victim?”
Stebbel didn’t skip a beat. “Maria was unlucky. Her pimp was off somewhere else and the killer found her all alone. Let’s face it, lucky and unlucky is often the difference between being alive and being dead.”
“But if it’s all luck, if it’s all random, then we’re simply … back there spinning around, not knowing which direction to go.”
Stebbel shrugged. Actually, his whole body signaled irritation.
“Steb, let me finish laying out my strategy here. We start hauling in the city’s pimps. We take them into the sweat box and give them a serious going over. The killer may break, right there, or at least give us enough tell-tale signs that we can pin him as the main suspect and go from there.”
Stebbel picked up a file lying on his desk. “Herr Colleague, I just discovered that there are upwards of 15,000 streetwalkers in this city. And those are just the ladies who have taken the trouble to register. So how many pimps are out there?”
“Each pimp has a stable, Herr Colleague. They’re not one-to-one.”
“But it’s also not a thousand prostitutes to each pimp. We would have to grab … hundreds of pimps to question, and then …”
He trailed off and the look of resignation on his face told Dörfner he should postpone any further discussion of his strategy. In the uneasy silence, Stebbel started sorting the papers on his desk into several piles, as Dörfner rubbed the back of his head with a flattened palm.
Dörfner headed back to his own desk and slumped into his chair. He took a deep sigh that he didn’t want Stebbel to either see or hear. But the senior could feel it; that’s how charged the air was. Stebbel knew he had to break the tension.
“But that was good work … finding out about Frau Prestel and her lack of a pimp. It is a step forward.”
“But a very small step, right?”
“At this point, any step at least means that we’re moving somewhere. And not just spinning.”
Dörfner again rubbed the back of his head with his open palm. Both inspectors were all too tired of this repeated spinning; as Stebbel had said once, it was giving him mental motion sickness.